We live in a universe filled with weird stuff that we don’t really understand: dark matter. Physicists have observed its spooky effects but have’t seen it directly. Even scarier: There seems to be around six times as much dark matter in the universe as regular matter.
If physics were complete as-is, the Universe wouldn’t exist. All particles would have found their antiparticle pairs and annihilated into a burst of energy. Matter and antimatter look like exact mirror images of one another, after all. There’s no difference between a particle and its antiparticle partner aside from…
When it comes to physics, fewer things are more exciting than proving something wrong. Proving theories wrong has led to entirely new fields of study. The fruits that come from wrongness can be so rewarding that scientists devote a considerable amount of time to probing well-known theories, hoping to find a crack.
Not to scare you, but you’re getting hit with radiation constantly. First, there’s just regular old light (yep, that’s a kind of radiation). Then there are low levels of higher energy radiation like the kind in nuclear reactors, including particles coming out of the soil and off of bananas. But the highest-energy…
Thunderclouds rolled into the Japanese beach town of Uchinada early one December morning in 2015. The scientists expected the storms; they’d staked out the location specifically for studying something normally only seen by satellites. Sometime after 5am, a flash of lightning struck a wind turbine. And along came a…
Tattoos are very cool and I do not want to say bad things about them. Evidence of tattooing dates back thousands of years, and the art form has a long history across the world in various cultures. Tattooing has associations with wealth, crime, or seafaring depending on where in history you look. Today, there’s no…
Particle accelerators have a lot of important jobs, like looking for new stuff by slamming beams of old stuff together. But a new particle accelerator observation has managed to be important while doing almost precisely the opposite of what we’d expect. Physicists have found evidence for hard-to-detect stuff by, well, …
Physicists make a lot of statements about stuff they hope will happen, but might not happen in their lifetimes. One physicist, for example, thought that in certain cases, the incredibly common but hard-to-detect neutrino particles would somehow make entire atomic nuclei wiggle. He thought it a silly idea to even…
You’re probably aware that stuff is made from particles. But the second most abundant particle in the universe, the neutrino, refuses to be fully understood. This tiny and elusive speck only barely interacts with the other particles that make up us humans and our galaxy. Its mysteries continue to confound the public…
Particle physics is rarely a cheap-and-easy endeavor. Just think about the Large Hadron Collider, buried deep beneath the Swiss-French border—it cost over 13 billion dollars to find the Higgs Boson. Well, today at 4:20PM (nice), America is breaking ground on another enormous particle physics experiment.
One of the most well-accepted physical theories makes no logical sense. Quantum mechanics, the theory that governs the smallest possible spaces, forces our human brains to accept some really wacky, uncomfortable realities. Maybe we live in a world where certain observations can force our universe to branch into…
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have discovered an exciting new particle—or rather, an exciting combination of particles. It doesn’t have quite the same impact that the Higgs Boson (the one people called the God Particle) did five years ago. But it does have people talking, and many folks are…
Physicist Usama Hussain laughed uncomfortably every time the conversation even got close to the question, “Do you look for nothing?” His professors would kill him if they heard him agree with that. After all, he’s technically looking for a brand new particle that may or may not exist, with the hopes that it might help…
There are lots of secret fans of particle physics. My favorite tweets of all time, for example, are ex-baseball player and steroid user Jose Canseco’s incredible opinions on the Higgs boson.
Four British schoolboys had just been called from class. They were ten days away from their A-level exams, the ones that determine the direction the rest of their lives would take, but they’d been interrupted from their studies to discuss the deepest secrets of the universe—their work hunting for the magnetic monopole…
If I were in America, the TSA agent would have called in backup on the spot and I would have received a long questioning. I had just asked the airport security agent if I could leave my laptop open as it rolled through the x-ray scanner. I pointed to the black thumb drive-looking thing sticking out of my USB port. I…
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND— Hiding in the suburbs behind trees and a meadow with furry brown donkeys is a warehouse with an elevator that only visits negative floors. Hundreds of feet down, hyper complex detectors inside an octagonal tube the color and size of a large barn whistle loudly and peer like cameras at protons, the…
Conceptually, particle physics experiments are surprisingly simple. Smash a shitload of particles together, and look at what comes out. The results will either confirm whatever the business-as-usual theory is, or, if there’s a really crystal clear deviation from that theory, they might prove some new hypothesis about…
An old MRI machine took a several-week boat journey around the world last week. Scientists are going to gut it, replace the bed, and try to understand the secrets of the universe with it—because, why not?
You might flee from words like “quarks,” “relativity,” and “joule,” but you shouldn’t have to, and neither should a kid. A new children’s book from the folks at a few of our national labs will hopefully make the things particle physicists are talking about easier to digest.
